Description
Our video project follows a series of interviews we conducted peers investigating what they believe happens to them, either physically or mentally when they fall asleep. We began by asking the open-ended question “when we all fall asleep, where do we go?” inspired by the lyrics of Billie Eilish. We chose an intentionally abstract question to explore the different interpretation and responses that each person would have. Unsurprisingly, many were puzzled by the question, but after we probed their brains a bit further, each person ended up providing an interesting personal perspective on what happens to them when they fall asleep.
The video is edited in a way that follows a compilation of responses related to a similar topic. For example, the beginning of the videos shows people’s initial confusion, followed by the middle portion of the video in which people explain where they are physically when are asleep and ending with the discussion of dreams.
Process
Both Sam, Abdullah and I began by going around campus interviewing people. Sam was the one interviewing, Abdullah filming, and I recorded with the Tascam. After that, Abdullah and I worked on audio editing with audacity and syncing the audio and video files together while Sam together the rough cut for the user-test. After the user-test, we realized that some of the parts of the video were unpleasant in terms of the audio quality or the angled at which the video was filmed. I filmed the interview of several more people and created another rough cut and sent that to Sam who put the dream filter on and polished up the final edits, meanwhile, Abdullah found the images to overlay on the video and created the trippy dream effect seen in the beginning. We were all pretty uninspired by the idea of adding interactive to the video, as we felt like interaction interrupts the experience. We, therefore, opted for a simple effect that allows you to switch from a video showing the reality to one that mimics a dream world, created by both Sam and Abdullah.
Challenges
Something I found personally challenging was having to scrap interviews from the final cut. There were seven interviews that we had to scrap, not because of their responses but because of poor visual and/or audio quality, which in hindsight could have been a simple fix.
Admittedly, we spent a large portion of our time deciding what to do for the interaction portion. This ate up a lot of our time because the video editing was dependent upon the interaction. We decided on the interaction rather late, which invoked other difficulties, such as my underestimation of how long it would take edit. Sifting through the entirety of the interviews for the suitable few seconds of footage took much longer than expected.
Below on the left is a photo of our initial plan for interaction and the right is what we finished with. We originally planned to put responses from each individual in their own separate boxes for the user to clock and watch, but we thought it would be a more pleasant and immersive experience for the user to watch the film in its entirety.
Reflection
I enjoyed the video portion of this project very much and was intrigued by the responses we gathered from the interviews. I now feel at ease using a Tascam and camera and found the editing process tedious yet enjoyable. However, in hindsight, I would tweak several things to make the video more coherent. Overall, the final product is, for the most part, what I had envisioned it would be and I am pleased with the final product.